I shall make sure your old man gets the letter, Mrs Salander.’ He retreated with a nod of his head, and they could hear the young soldiers mounting up on their assortment of army-requisitioned mules and nags outside. Grant was fetching Rodric’s riding horse out, a king of beasts amongst beggars. How would it fare, Emily wondered suddenly, in the swamps of the Levant front? Too late now to ask that question.
The three Marshwic sisters clustered at the door and watched the sergeant and his recruits ride off into the mist, until only the blurred light of their lanterns identified them in the dark.
I thought you might do something unpatriotic . . .
The time for such action was past. She was Emily Marshwic, of good family, with a public dignity that even old matrons approvingly remarked on; nevertheless she had done her level best to hold the King’s orders at arm’s length. Without Rodric’s knowledge, against his express wishes, she had tried her utmost to fight his drafting. She now had no more fight to give.
After the recruiting sergeants had drummed up all the actual volunteers they would get, and the proclamation had gone out that each household, high or low, must give up one of their own to take the Red, she had protested vehemently. She had gone and spoken her piece to the officers and the officials, and they had nodded and explained how important it was that this war was won quickly. Then Tubal had robbed her arguments of any force by purchasing a commission, and she had looked a fool, and her sister Mary had become a widow-in-waiting. And when the order had come to her house that those retainers who had served the Marshwic family for so many years – whose families had grown with the Marshwics for generations like vines to a tree, and who claimed Grammaine as their home – must leave her, she had protested. She had refused, in fact. She had held out for two weeks until Mr Northway, the Mayor-Governor of Chalcaster, had come to her door with his odious smile and undertaker’s clothes, and explained things to her. He had said – and all the while his eyes twinkled with cold humour – that there were mills and workshops and farms that were critically undermanned, now that the men were at the front. He showed her the King’s sealed order dissolving contracts of service, allowing men like himself to take what they wanted. He made a great, ingratiating play of remorse, threatening to leave the three sisters all alone in Grammaine like mad recluses, and then magnanimously relenting. ‘You may keep your old man there, he’s surely not fit to work in the factories, and it would be criminal to leave three such vulnerable women without protection, so I’ll leave your groundsman too, although I’m risking royal displeasure by showing you that much favour.’ And he had smiled with a broad and lip-less mouth, cold as a reptile. ‘You shall have a maid and your cook – at least until the next decree is passed to me. Can I say fairer than that? I don’t think that I can.’
And he was not a fair-minded man, that much she knew. The Marshwics and Mr Northway had a twisted history together, in which their own fortunes had only withered as he had leeched off them; until they were impoverished in all but history and memories, and he governed Chalcaster and grew fat.
Yet still, when the sergeants had come that last time and found that Rodric was now their lawful prey – when her brother was formally invited to grace the war with his presence – she had gone to Chalcaster, with a foul taste in her mouth, to plead with Mr Northway.
It had been no small sacrifice on her part to throw herself on the mercy of such a creature as he. It was widely known around Chalcaster that the man had bought his post, greasing every palm from here to the capital to ensure his own slick rise into fortune. To most it was just another example of the politics of power. The King’s justice would find Mr Northway out eventually, they said, but until then they just shrugged and sighed. For Emily – for the Marshwics of Grammaine – it was far more personal than that. Going begging to the man, going cap in hand in search of a charity she knew would not be extended, was like stabbing